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Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in
empty heart on fire's LiveJournal:
| Wednesday, July 2nd, 2008 | |
| 9:31 pm | come here, little girl get into the car it's a brand new cadillac. bright red. Current Music: Laurie Anderson |
| Monday, June 30th, 2008 | |
| 12:16 am | go me! Egypt recognizes M:Solipsistos for his design at egypt 1180 6944, passing The Test of Dancing Waters. My fountain was so awesome, it passed in one week. ( Here's what it looks like. ) Current Mood: accomplished |
| Saturday, June 28th, 2008 | |
| 11:18 pm | Sheesh. Because what Doctor Who needed is more Kate Bush. |
| Thursday, June 26th, 2008 | |
| 8:51 pm | kaossssssssssss So, I got me a Korg Kaossilator. I have played with it for one day, and here are my impressions. - this is the coolest piece of portable electronic music gear I've played with since the MC202. - this is also the most frustrating piece of portable electronic music gear I've played with since the MC202. The touchpad control is brilliant. It's totally intuitive. I was able to sit down and make music within minutes of picking the thing up. On the other hand, limiting it to 3 buttons and a dial (and the hidden button on the bottom!) is annoying. Half the functions require combinations of button-presses. At least they're all labelled on there... Making loops and playing with them is SO EASY. On the other hand, you get two measures. TWO? Not four? 8 beats, not 16? WHAT? Would it have cost THAT much more to put in a 128k memory chip instead of a 64k chip? 4 measures means you can pretend it's a song. 2 is just weird. And no memory. Make 2 measures of music, turn it off, it's gone! Is flash THAT expensive? Or, well. You'd need to add another button to give it the ability to save patterns to flash RAM, and that would mean a case redesign (yeah, they use the same case for the mini Kaoss Pad and the Kaossilator). 99 patches is okay. I suspect they limited it based on the display, though. And how about that display? You know you're using an instrument built into a glorified effects pedal when you get a 2-digit fluorescent display. The patches are decent, but very generic. 20 sound effects patches (even if they ARE 8-bit video game noises and stuff) is a waste of at least 10 patch slots, too. Give me more instruments. Or more drum loops. The drum loops are pretty cool, and using the patterns to make more complex loops by sequencing touchpad taps is easy and satisfying. It works pretty well, considering how limited it really is. And that, I guess, is the crux of it. For 200 bucks, this is a VERY limited instrument. No sync of any kind (MIDI, trigger, nothing), no way to save patterns, nothing. Where the MC202 was a weird little sequency sketchpad thing, this is most like a musical post-it note. A post-it note that falls off the wall and is lost forever as soon as you turn around. It's even bright yellow. But it's so much fun to mess with! Too bad it sounds so much like itself... So, overall, it's neat. It's portable and cool and a nice pocket music toy, but the limitations are crazy. It's almost like Korg decided to ship a proof-of-concept prototype. $200 is too expensive, but you can't even find them used on eBay for enough less than list price to make it worth the hassle. They're fun! You can make neat noises! I really want to see version 2, though. Right now it's not really mature. That doesn't meant it's not NEAT, it's just that it's as frustrating as it is cool. |
| Tuesday, June 24th, 2008 | |
| 12:50 am | Busted Wonder is complete! Busted Wonder, a web graphic novel thing (it's more than just a webcomic, for sure) written by Kieron Gillen and illustrated by Charity Larrison, is at last complete! Go read it! Kieron G is cool in general and is currently hard at work on the second volume of Phonogram (basically my favorite comic of the past couple of years) (OH AND HELLO MR BLOG SEARCHER) and ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} charitylarrison is one of my favorite artists and somebody I've been paying attention to for quite a while now. It's great to see this finally wrapped up (and to finally figure out why it's named what it is). Yay yay fanboy out time. |
| Wednesday, June 18th, 2008 | |
| 11:02 pm | how spore just sold itself. Okay, so EA releasing the Spore creature creator ahead of time was basically a brilliant maneuver. First off, it's a piece of one of the most anticipated games of the past few years, and that's always good. But more importantly, it puts a basic creation tool into the hands of loads of potential players. Even the free version (get it at spore.com) is enough of a tool to let players make some interesting little critters. Here is the Scary Bordie as one particular example. (Movie here (avi format).) So now, I've made a handful of critters-- The Scary Bordie, the Nose Lizard, and a couple of others, and now, well. I've seen my creations MOVE and LIVE. Now I want to see them CONQUER the UNIVERSE! Spore isn't a particularly obvious sort of game. It's too BIG. It goes from primordial ooze all the way to space travel-- that's a lot for a player to wrap his or her head around! In particular, where's the GAME? Where is the part where I win or lose, and how does this become fun without being simultaneously really really frustrating? Will I watch my critters evolve from protozoa all the way up to the industrial age, only to nuke themselves into dust and leave my little simulated planet floating alone and lifeless through the night? Consider how close we, the only actual real civilization we know, have skirted that potentiality. Would a game that avoids it be both playable AND believable? (Or would that depend, potentially, on how cynical I'm feeling at the very moment I sit down to play it?) I'd been a little skeptical. It's certainly an ambitious concept. Does it become an entertaining game at the same time? A ship date has been set. Will it really ship this time? Can Will Wright pull this off again, after so many successes and so many failures? (I played SimEarth as part of a science class once, and it wasn't actually very entertaining, especially when one's grade depended on it.) But now, well, it's a different story. Sure, the creature I named "Hexapodia is the key insight" is basically a goofy critter with unfeasible arms, but the Scary Bordie? It's also a silly sort of beast, but you know? I really want to see that little sausage with arms and legs reach the stars. One suspicion that the people I've been talking with about the Creature Creator share is that EA is using user-created content to seed the universe, and that we may, while exploring the stars with our as-yet-un-procedurally-generated progeny, meet our own creations cheerfully living out their sausagey lives on one of the countless planets that will make up our universes. I suspect there is a seed of truth at the core of this theory. Personally, I hope it's true. Sure, I've given birth to these creatures as basically an evening's throwaway entertainment. They are born, live, move about on the screen, interact with the offspring I create with a click of my mouse, and then vanish again, saved to disk as I quit the Creature Creator and go back to browsing the web, but in my head they live full and interesting lives. The Scary Bordie (Bordaeus Territos) _deserves_ to walk the plains of some as-yet ungenerated planet, to build up its cities, and to finally leave the generative planet of its birth and fly to the stars, where, if chance and some random number generator somewhere are willing, it may meet the Nose Lizard, or the proud and terrible Nikkasaurus X... And that's why the Spore Creature Creator has worked for me. It's silly, because I know on a purely intellectual level that it may end up being ultimately unsatisfying, or may, like The Sims, provide a few hours or a few days of dollhouse satisfaction before the formless open-endedness leaves me without goals and bored, but still, if I can see my progeny reach for the stars, it will be worth it. That all-important emotional bond has been forged, and that's why, in the end, I will most likely buy the damn game the day it comes out and rush home to install it (or download it as quickly as my internet connection allows). I am now connected to it through the bonds of, well, family. Or at least the bonds of pets. How could I desert my creatures? |
| Monday, June 16th, 2008 | |
| 10:32 am | hey costuming people! Does anyone know where I could acquire some Bedouin desert robes and stuff, or patterns for making them? I'm not worried about them being too authentic, but they should be functional-- that is, they shouldn't be non-breathing synthetic fabrics. It seems I may be hanging out in the desert for a week or so, and they're the people who know how to dress for it... Most of the google hits are for belly-dancing outfits, which isn't quite what I'm going for here, as attractive as that might be. |
| Sunday, June 8th, 2008 | |
| 10:34 pm | frink Ladies and gentlemen, may I present: The Dramatic Lemur. |
| Tuesday, June 3rd, 2008 | |
| 1:18 pm | everything I need to know in life I learned from Top Chef Well, not everything, but, in general, you could watch this and get some good pointers for general success... - Know what you're good at and when to use those skills. - Also know when not to. Just because you CAN make foams of everything doesn't mean you should. - Don't try to educate people who are waiting for lunch. - Double-check important details. (Temperatures, who's doing what, and so on.) - A little planning goes a long way. - So does paying attention to the rules. - Pay attention to context and setting. What works in one may not work in another. - Calling people on their bullshit can be satisfying but mostly doesn't help, and if you aren't really careful you'll end up looking like the asshole. - Working as a team works better than competing with your teammates. Maybe only one person can win in the end, but if your team loses, you all lose. - Know when to innovate and experiment and when to stand by your strengths. - Know your audience. - Your bitchy commentary will come back to haunt you. - Don't serve anything you haven't tasted. Yeah, deep. There you go. Current Mood: congested |
| Monday, June 2nd, 2008 | |
| 11:36 pm | manliest news headline ever? can't really argue with that, I guess. |
| Tuesday, May 13th, 2008 | |
| 11:42 am | cosplay! Beat this, anime nerds! Best cosplay ever! |
| Sunday, May 11th, 2008 | |
| 3:37 pm | |
| Monday, April 28th, 2008 | |
| 10:20 am | mortgages Okay, so I have stayed out of politics here, but this is interesting: How the candidates would address the foreclosure crisis. Considering how fucked the economy is because of this, not to mention the already-beleaguered middle class (what's left of it), this _should_ be a major issue in the primaries, let alone the actual election... |
| 10:13 am | Korg DS-10 |
| Friday, April 25th, 2008 | |
| 10:45 am | patti smith and kevin shields... Patti Smith and Kevin Shields (you know, My Bloody Valentine? Yeah, him.) are going to make an album together. |
| Monday, April 21st, 2008 | |
| 11:29 pm | Who's a pretty fish? |
| Wednesday, April 16th, 2008 | |
| 2:45 pm | medbloggin So I spent a lot of time reading medblogs earlier this year, and Trauma Queen is one of the most consistently enjoyable. (Yeah, so the first post on there right now is a birthday-related link request. Oh well. He seems like a decent guy, so happy birthday to him!) |
| Tuesday, April 15th, 2008 | |
| 10:33 am | oh my eyes I have new glasses. They replace my VERY scratched-up old glasses, which were getting bad enough that I was getting lots of glare driving at night, and made movies annoying to watch. My new glasses are slightly more stylish, I guess. They're wider and more rectangular, but not super-wide super-square hipster glasses. They also have the brand name in tiny letters down the temples, which I need to figure out how to eradicate without looking awful. They're a slightly different prescription, too, which means that nothing looks like it's the right distance away. I spent yesterday making sure to hold onto the handrail when walking down stairs. I suppose I'll get used to that soon enough, but it's still kind of disconcerting. The local eye doctor, rather than testing internal eyeball pressure with a little puff of air, tests it by numbing your eyeball and poking you with a little thingy. I could hardly do it. My eyes are watering up and I'm blinking a lot just thinking about it. Anyway, yay new glasses. |
| Tuesday, April 8th, 2008 | |
| 10:01 am | New old watch This was part of a box of random mostly junk watches from a guy on eBay. It's my current favorite. |
| Friday, April 4th, 2008 | |
| 11:19 am | |
